People have to drive cars, because the United States is too big. If you overlaid the U.S. on the map of North America, it’d stretch from Tierra del Fuego to Helsinki! That’s why we don’t build compact, walkable cities with the necessities of daily life near where people live, the country is too large and there’s just not enough space!
</most reasonable carbrain take>
I just wish there was a way I could frighten pedestrians or throw waste out the windows on trains. I really like doing these things in my truck and would hate to give that up.
Well rolling coal on trains is well-established technology, we just have to go back to it.
If I can’t nail someone upside the head with a pissgallon while I drive over their toddler, I’m frankly disinterested
Trains work great in the USA. We didn’t invent them but we’ve sure had our way with them.
- We have thousands of miles of track which ships millions of tons of freight every year.
- We have a system of moving passengers around the country which, while not perfect, still manages to function despite multiple alternatives.
- We have thousands of miles of commuter trains around metropolises that move people to the city and out of the city everyday.
- We have above ground light rail trolleys in some places, though not as many as we once had.
- We have multiple kinds of underground trains; ones that move people through subways and ones that move material out of mines.
- We even have trains that are purely for entertainment value, usually called heritage railroads or tourist trains.
- Oh and lots of airports have a small automatically controlled train that ferries passengers along the terminals.
Freight trains work great in the US, much better than in much of Europe btw, with a considerably larger freight share. In terms of passenger rail, the US is however a developing country, at best. Some metropolitan areas still have proper dense rail based transit but really but not many. Those systems are basically limited to the East Coast and Chicago, with only NYC really having an impressively large network but even that has seen disinvestment for pretty much a full century.
Sure but every large city and many medium to small cities have mass transit via buses. Not technically trains but if we’re talking passenger mass transit it’s better than nothing. America isn’t really a developing country when it comes to passenger service, that sort of insults everyone. India is a developing country and they pack so deep onto trains that they ride the roofs and hang off the sides. America had a very large passenger network at one time, which downsized because of the publics adoption of automobiles. It’s very developed, you’re ignoring cities that have a metropolis rail system like LA, Philly, etc. The cities that tend to have none at all are southern cities that got built up in the last 50ish years once AC became common place (Texas.) Even then I think some of those communities are pushing for some passenger rail service.
Thing to remember is we’ll never have anything like Europes system because most European countries are the size of an American state. We have such vast distances between some major cities (new york to LA) that you can’t reasonably expect a passenger rail system.
Those bus networks are the bare minimum in many places, often they are worse than the bus network for example in the rural nowhere of Austria, both in coverage and frequency and connectedness.
To be fair, the suboptimal bus serivce is not even the primary issue. The thing is, that as the majority of urban/suburban areas are completely car centric, public transit simply cannot work effectively. It is by design a crutch that cannot replace the car in many if not most situations. The metropolitan areas are largely designed in a way that transit is so handicapped that it is often only an option without any other option.
I am not talking about what was but what is. The US had a very good PT network in basically any city or even town that was there long enough for that (and there were plenty, especially more or less the entire east coast but als Mid West and even the West Coast, among others). However, the US decided to largely destroy that and destroy its cities to turn them into fully car oriented places. The US did not have to do that, it chose to do that.
I am not ignoring the East coast it is the only place in the US where there are rail based transit networks that feel adequate when compared internationally to other developed countries. Basically all of them however have suffered from either decades or even an entire century of disinvestment. I would only exclude the DC Metro from that. But even that one suffers from the same thing almost all networks suffer: PT is only good for people from further out, if they want to go to downtown but after decades of suburbanisation, most trips are from somewhere in the suburbs to somewhere in the suburbs and even if such connections exist, without big detour via downtown, they often take excessively long.
PS: No one expects a rail service between NYC to LA. That is a straw man really. The East Coast, well scratch that, actually the entire east of the country would be suitable for one big dense network (thinning out towards the west), on top of that the entire West Coiast would be too and then local network in between would make a lot of sense, eg in Texas. Most US cities lie also on well suited High Speed Rail corridors. There is not a single one in existence, one is under construction, at construction costs more than ten times what it costs in most other developed countries (and no, it is not the challenging geography, other countries have that too, most of the money is not even spent on construction). How should one call that if not underdeveloped passenger rail?
wait wait wait wait wait wait wait
fuck cars obviously but more than 250 million PER MILE sounds like it was taken out of “tales from the 1923 hyperinflation”.
I assume it was the full cost, not the cost per mile
The full cost is (conservatively) expected to be $126 BILLION.
holy f-ing shit!
I know in France, ten-ish years ago, high speed rail cost about 1 Million € per km… even if it increased ten fold, that still would be roughly about 20 MILLION per mile.
insane ! either I’m missing something crucial, or you guys are getting ripped off
The Texas government is heavily Republican, and Austin is heavily Democratic, so the state has a grudge against the city. The cost for this project is to literally destroy large areas of the central city to make room. It’s worth the cost in their minds to “pwm the libs.”
It’s hard to convey to people outside the U.S. just how psychopathically evil Republicans are.
TBF I’d love to be able to check my car on a plane
When the harm you cause by flying just isn’t enough, so you start bringing 2 tons of luggage with you.
I have a diesel super duty as well so I really could push past that two ton mark in a pinch
Where are you flying to that doesn’t already have cars?
Do you know how much rental cars cost these days?
Less than airlifting a 2-tonne car, I’ll wager
![[Satire] Welp, I'm convinced. Trains are a futile pursuit in the US](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6be9b37d-d56e-4710-ba21-8db0b4c67cf9.png){kind=link}